We hope you can join us on Saturday, February 14 at 7:30 p.m. for the next reading in the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series at Washington Printmakers Gallery (1732 Connecticut Ave., second floor, on Connecticut between R and S, several blocks north of the Dupont Circle Q Street metro exit), featuring BETSY FAGIN and MARIANA RUIZ FIRMAT and with special guest host Buck Downs.

BETSY FAGIN's poems appear in a number of literary journals including Five Fingers Review, Fence, Skanky Possum, So to Speak, Torch, and The World among others. She is the author of For Every Solution There is a Problem (Open 24 Hours). Recent work appears in Pom2 and Van Gogh's Ear. Betsy's poems lead us lurking through halls of knowledge and activity, to find unclaimed turf where the music of space can be clearly heard.

MARIANA RUIZ FIRMAT lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Mariana has lived in New York for four years and before that lived in Santa Cruz, California where she met fellow poet Brenda Bordofsky. She works for a progressive foundation in New York and for Hunter College developing a violence against women curriculum for high school youth. She is a member of national INCITE! where she is trying to connect the political with the poetic. Mariana has been published in 6x6, Tool A Magazine and POep. Her chapbook, Another Strange Island was published in 2003 by Open 24 Hours Books. Mariana zigzags through a tidal surge of idea and image in her poems, and their surfaces glint with a crystalline salt.